


Faith

by INMH



Series: hc_bingo Amnesty Fills [11]
Category: Far Cry 5, Life Is Strange (Video Game)
Genre: Brainwashing, Dark, Drama, Drugs, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Psychological Manipulation, Strong Language, Tattoos
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-30
Updated: 2018-04-30
Packaged: 2019-04-30 01:12:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,402
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14485527
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/INMH/pseuds/INMH
Summary: Fusion AU. Rachel is Faith, but Faith is a different Rachel.





	Faith

  
“What are your sins?”  
  
Rachel doesn’t know where to start.  
  
_I ran away._  
  
_I did drugs._  
  
_I drank._  
  
_I swore._  
  
_I manipulated and allowed myself to be manipulated._  
  
_I was not a good person._  
  
“How specific should I be?” She asks, head spinning a little from the sparkles, from the green-white mist of the Bliss. Of all the drugs she’s ever taken, none have ever made her feel as good as this.  
  
Joseph’s fingers slide across her cheek, through her hair. “Not very,” he assures her. “Generality is fine. Lust, wrath, greed, and the like.” His fingers continue stroking lightly through her hair as she thinks, and Rachel leans into it. It reminds her of when she was a child, when her father wasn’t a bastard and she actually enjoyed his affectionate gestures; Joseph has been so much better, so much less of a disgusting hypocritical asshole, and it had not been difficult to call him Father.  
  
“What would ditching school and running away from home be?” She asks, rolling her head to look at John, who’s waiting patiently nearby with the tattoo gun.  
  
“Mm… Pride? Sloth?” John suggests lightly, looking to Joseph for confirmation.  
  
Joseph thinks on it for a moment. “…Pride, perhaps. Why did you do it?”  
  
Rachel understands herself better than she ever did before, and so the reasoning rolls off her tongue easily. “I thought I was above it all. I thought I was above that school and its fake people and its pointless lessons, and everyone’s expectations.”  
  
“You weren’t _wrong_ necessarily,” John mutters, and flinches soon after; she can’t see his face, but Rachel can sense that Joseph had fixed him with a hard look.  
  
“Whether or not those expectations were wrong, or those students were false, or those lessons were pointless, is not the point, John,” Joseph says sternly. “What matters is that Rachel thought she was above it all, that she was superior to all else.”  
  
“Yes, Joseph,” John mumbles, and picks up the tattoo gun.  
  
PRIDE is etched on her chest, just under her collarbone.  
  
“What else?”  
  
Rachel thinks. “Drugs,” She mumbles. “I did a lot of drugs. I sold them on campus, and tried to lie my way out of it when I got caught.” She remembers reacting so badly when David caught her, her grudge against him born entirely of what Chloe had told her of her stepfather. She had felt so entitled to sell drugs to her classmates, to indulge in such dangerous things on her own, all for the sake of making money and getting high to avoid another day of reality in Arcadia Bay.  
  
“Sloth and Greed,” John says, and there’s a note of familiarity in his voice. Rachel’s eyes roll to the tattoo on his chest, where her PRIDE now sits on her own; he knows her sins because they’re his own as well.  
  
“I agree,” Joseph says.  
  
SLOTH goes on one shoulder, GREED on the other.  
  
She doesn’t even feel the sting of the needle through the haze of the Bliss, and when he’s done, John covers the tattoos with ointment-laden bandages. “Why’re you doing that?” Rachel asks.  
  
“Tattoos,” John explains, “are basically open wounds- or rather, they should be treated as open wounds. Don’t care for them properly and they get infected.”  
  
Rachel thinks of the tiny star tattoo on her wrist, and the dragon on her calf; the star was fine, but the dragon had become red and irritated and had leaked pus for over a week before it finally calmed down. Rachel had done everything in her power not to let her mom realize she had a fever, and after bumming some nearly-expired antibiotics from Frank, the symptoms had gone away.  
  
“Not that I’m complaining, John,” Joseph says mildly, “But why did you go into law when you could have just as easily gone into tattoo artistry? You seem quite passionate about it.”  
  
John smiles, says, “Law was a more secure and lucrative career.”

“And by that,” Jacob’s voice floats over from the side of the room, out of Rachel’s line of vision, “He means that he realized he could make a career out of arguing with people and wasn’t about to pass it up.”  
  
John gives him a flat look, and Joseph chuckles behind Rachel’s head.  
  
“What next, my dear?”  
  
“Envy,” Rachel says, because she’s on a roll now. “I envied so many people, envied their freedom, envied their choices, envied their lives and wanted them for my own.”  
  
ENVY is emblazoned on the upside of her left thigh.  
  
“She’s running out of skin,” Jacob mutters.  
  
“We all did,” Joseph responds, and lightly pulls Rachel’s head back so he can smile down at her reassuringly. “What else?”  
  
Rachel thinks, brain jumping naturally to one of the most obvious of sins. “Lust. I lusted a lot, after men and women both.” She stumbles over those last few words; she has been a devoted member of Eden’s Gate for months, and realizes now that she doesn’t know the policy about same-sex attractions.  
  
But Joseph and Jacob make no comment, and John does not visibly react to this revelation about Rachel’s life.  
  
Instead, John bites his lip. “Is this your last sin? Because the word ‘lust’ is short, and I can put it on your back without much trouble if you’d rather save the front for something longer and more painful.”  
  
Rachel is quiet for a moment.  
  
“No,” She says, finally, “It’s not my last.”  
  
So LUST is etched onto her lower back, which doesn’t press against the back of the chair and will make the remainder of this session more bearable. The Bliss is starting to wear off, and Rachel can feel abused skin starting to make itself known, itching and clawing at her nerves, a warning that it did not much like having needles poking and prodding and injecting permanent ink underneath it.  
  
“What are the others?”  
  
The one that came to mind, the one that made her stomach clench with anxiety and pain, simmered for a moment or two before finally breaking to the surface.  
  
“Chloe.”  
  
She has to pause, has to get herself straight, otherwise it will all come out in a jumbled mess of regret and shame.  
  
“I misled her,” Rachel’s voice quivers for the first time. “I was her friend, but I let her believe we would be more. I was selfish; I wanted her time, I wanted her companionship, I wanted her affection, I wanted her as an accomplice, and I did it by letting her believe there would be more between us than I ever intended there to be.” She shuts her eyes, and a surprising amount of tears squeeze out in response.  
  
“Gluttony,” Joseph whispers briefly to John before sliding his hands through Rachel’s hair and leaning down to press his head against the back of hers. “Shh,” he whispers, and Rachel welcomes the sting of the GLUTTONY tattoo on her right thigh, opposite the ENVY one. “You have confessed your sins, you wear them so you might remember them and defend against them in the future. You are doing well.”  
  
Rachel knows the truth of the Collapse, knows she will never see Chloe or anyone else in Arcadia Bay again; she deserves it, deserves never to apologize or directly atone to them for what she’s done.  
  
She doesn’t wait for Joseph or John to ask. The last sin comes because it just seems right to have the complete set.  
  
“I hated everyone,” Rachel whispers, even though it’s not one-hundred percent true. “I hated everyone and everything. I hated my life.”  
  
“Wrath,” Jacob sighs. “And with that, we have the magic number.”  
  
John flounders for a moment, hesitating, but then scratches out WRATH on Rachel’s belly, before stretching his arms and bending backwards to work the kinks out of his back.  
  
“I would hesitate to call it magic,” Joseph responds, finally stepping around front so Rachel can see him clearly. “But it is a release of sorts. A catharsis to admit and atone for one’s sins.” He kneels down in front of Rachel, who is exhausted beyond belief and wants badly to sleep, or to make her way back to the Bliss. “You’ve done marvelously. You are now part of our family. You are our sister, our Faith.”  
  
Rachel smiles, and bliss comes to her naturally now.  
  
“Thank you, Father,” she whispers. “I won’t disappoint you.”  
   
-End


End file.
